20190802.0430

Even with as much writing as I do--whether churning out poems or essays in this webspace or writing commentaries or reports on another blog I maintain, or else posting to keep still another webspace alive and afloat--I feel like I need to be doing more. I should not have let myself fall behind in my journal-writing again, I should be pushing out papers, I should be submitting my writing for sale--and I should be doing the kind of writing that can be sold. And I should be doing all of it in addition to taking care of all of the other things I need to do every day, as well as all of the things I want to do with my day. And I should still somehow get enough sleep and exercise and all of the rest of it, so that I can take care of myself in ways that let me take care of other things well.
It's a legacy of my having been in academe, I know, coupled with my working-class heritage (though I am decidedly white-collar at this point, being poised to take over as executive director at my main job and maintaining my status as a visiting professor in my main side-job) and the prevailing productivity culture at work in the United States and elsewhere in the world. I spent years in environments that demand every waking moment be spent making something that can be sold (preferably by someone else, who takes more of the money than is passed on), that as few moments be spent asleep as can be managed (and those are still too many), and even if I did not do as well in them as might have been hoped, they have marked me in ways I still struggle against.
I am aware that my struggles are far less than many others' are, of course. My job now is one that involves inside work with little to no heavy lifting. The pay is decent, and I am in position to actually help people. Not all have it so good, and I try to remember that. But even when I do keep it in mind and am appropriately grateful (or approach being so, because I cannot be as good as the people in my life deserve to have me be), I am aware that I need to be doing more. More from me is needed, and I only fail to provide it because I am somehow lazy and selfish. I keep too much for myself without making more of what I have make more for me. I let myself be indolent in that I rest at all, and how can I allow myself to do that, when there are so many who do so much more and better than I?
Competition can be a healthy thing, one that brings about greater results than might otherwise have been the case. The thing is, the competition has to end, and there is something about that seems to keep it going long after it should have been done. Even now, I am caught up in it, and if I did learn at last to stop knocking at every door when my knuckles bled against them, I have not yet learned how to get out of the bout to do more in which I find myself. I do not yet know how to make it not be never enough.